find the nearest time for all times in a column

Question

I have a column ("timestamp2") including 66 times and want to find the nearest time for each time, and then calculate the time interval for these two times.

For example, the first time in the column "timestamp2" is "2020-08-18 18:15:37", the nearest time to this time should be "2020-08-18 18:15:44" and the time interval between these two times should be 6 seconds.

There are many solutions to the problem of finding the closest time for a given time in a time column. My question is a little different as it requires searching within the given column and needs to require the time and time interval.

hello, can you use `dput` on a sample of your data to make this [a reproducible example](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example)? — bouncyball, Sep 02 '20 at 12:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 02 '20 at 13:19

You could e.g. use order and diff:

DF <- data.frame(i = 1:66, timestamp2 = Sys.time()-runif(66, min = 1, max = 100))
DF <- DF[order(DF$timestamp2),]
DF$timediff <- c(NA_real_, diff(DF$timestamp2))

    i          timestamp2     timediff
64 64 2020-09-02 15:11:47           NA
65 65 2020-09-02 15:11:48 1.1161799431
58 58 2020-09-02 15:11:52 3.4341783524
13 13 2020-09-02 15:11:53 1.0964329243
5   5 2020-09-02 15:11:55 2.0064251423
59 59 2020-09-02 15:11:55 0.0007073879

Or if you just want the resulting vector: diff(sort(DF$timestamp2))

find the nearest time for all times in a column

1 Answers1